Research
A Stylistic Appraisal of Ayi Kwei Armahas The Beautyful Ones are not Yet Born
The paper examines language use in African fiction through a stylistic appraisal of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. A fiction which ponders on the corruption that pervades Ghana even after independence, the novel reveals interesting societal vices through the hero, The Man. This study mainly investigates the stylistic features in the novel hinging heavily on the theory of cohesion in discourse, and reveals that various stylistic features are used by the novelist to communicate the writer’s thematic concerns. They include substitution, repetition, conjunctions, digression, temporal abridgement and figurative language.
The Illocutionary Frames Principle (IFP) and the Austinian Postulations: A Clause-structure Investigative Discourse
Austin (1962) is a theory of speech act; in this regard, it is essentially a theory in pragmatics, which as a field of language study, studies how language is used according to varied contextual nuances. In this paper, my arguments subtly engage semantics and those pragmatic notions which constitute the communicative elements produced by clause structure. I explore the System of Mood, the Abstract Performative Hypothesis and the Illocutionary Frames Principle (IFP) to establish my positions. The findings include: the clause in which a speech act verb occurs determines illocutionary acts performed in discourse, among other things; linguistic issues abound, which reveal the strengths and weaknesses of Austinian postulations; apart from determining what is communicated in discourse, clause structure also has effects and implications on meaning and participants.
